Battle of the sizes: Social network users vs. country populations
Social networks are getting huge. So big, in fact, that many of them are competing in size with some of the largest countries in the world.
To give you (and us) a nice and visual overview of how today’s social networks stack up against countries in terms of sheer size, we have put together this chart:
Some quick observations:
- Apparently the Chinese social network QZone is even bigger than Facebook.
- Facebook is bigger than Russia.
- MySpace is pretty close in size to Mexico.
- LinkedIn, Bebo and Xanga are bigger than Canada.
- Considering Twitter’s strong growth, it won’t be long until it’s bigger than Sweden.
- Orkut is larger (barely) than France.
- And finally: Does EVERYONE in the Philippines have a Friendster account? Both Friendster and the Philippines have a population of 90 million. We had heard it’s popular there, but still…
If we view the Internet as a virtual companion to the real world, then social networks could be considered countries in this virtual world. And as you can see, these countries are getting enormous. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years. How large can they get?
Data sources: Country populations are from Wikipedia. Social network sizes are always difficult to find reliable, up-to-date sources for, but we did our best: The numbers for MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, Xanga, Imeem, Last.fm and Twitter are all from Wikipedia. The QZone number is from here. The Facebook number is from here.The Windows Live Spaces number is from here. The LinkedIn number is from here. The Livejournal number is from here. The Orkut number is from here.
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Danny S
March 13th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Great chart! I love this kind of stuff.
I’ve never heard of Qzone, but then again, I’m not Chinese. 200 million… waaah…
Moody
March 13th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Nice visualization. Thanks for sharing.
One thing to take into consideration is overlap between social networks. Some people will have accounts in several.
Bloghology Social Network
March 14th, 2009 at 6:53 am
interesting chart. just hope that the sources are real and not promos by the networks owners
Listorbit
March 19th, 2009 at 5:27 am
That is very good graphical presentation.
simply Superb.
Harry Monroe
May 24th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Keep up the good work, another informative post.
Jexy G
June 27th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Just letting you know, that the statistics you have for MySpace are extremely outdated (the 100 millionth account was created in mid 2006 according to Wikipedia, but it has increased by nearly threefold since then) The current number of profiles in my network (mostly because they are friends with Tom) is 262,763,638. That means there is at least that many user accounts on MySpace. That would mean it is closer to the population of the United States, and the largest Social Networking site in the world.
_ck_
July 27th, 2010 at 6:12 am
I’d love to see this updated for 2010, unless it’s already been done and I can’t find it.
Maybe also a showdown of CMS systems, ie. WP has 10 million installs, vs Drupal, Joomla, etc.
Pingdom
July 27th, 2010 at 7:02 am
@ _ck_ : Thanks for the suggestions. We’ll see what happens.